Biography
The Insaints, a punk outfit, earned greater notoriety through their confrontational performances than through their recordings, drawing notice from mainstream outlets across the San Francisco Bay Area as well as from law enforcement. Frontwoman Marian Anderson drove most of the friction by staging and taking part in explicit sexual acts during shows, which produced an early-’90s arrest on lewd-conduct charges at Berkeley’s Gilman Street. A year of court proceedings later, the New York City ACLU helped Anderson prevail in the case. Assembled in Modesto in 1988 and relocated to the Bay Area in 1990, the band placed seven songs on the MRR label in 1993 via a double 7" shared with Diesel Queens; the tracks matched the imprint’s approach with rapid, smeared, and caustic punk. Every surviving Insaints recording—four unused cuts from the split 7" session together with nine further live and studio performances from the early ’90s that edged slightly toward pop-punk and recalled the work of Blondie—appeared on the 2004 compilation Sins of Saints.
Albums